1898.] ESSAYS. 103 



learned the secret of them, that is all. Let us read the later 

 solution. We have to-day I am told, — I do not know anything 

 about it, hut so I am told, — we have over two thousand varie- 

 ties of that wholesome, delicious fruit, the apple. Two hun- 

 dred years ago there were less than one hundred varieties, and 

 when we go so far back as the time of the Romans, while thej^ 

 had the apple and the pear, from Pliny's description of them, 

 Mr. Darwin concludes that they were a fruit so sour and hard 

 that today we would not tolerate them. When you go back 

 to Adam's day the apple was nothing but a bush of savage 

 thorns, and the fruit was so sour and hard that the old tradition 

 that Eve tempted Adam with an apple is put out of court 

 entirely. It would have offered no temptation, the first bite 

 would have been enough. I doubt if he could have bitten the 

 thing even. 



The deepest meaning of that thorny bush was hidden yet. 

 The book of Genesis says that thorns came as a curse to man. 

 The difficulty is with that idea, that as a matter of fact we find 

 the remains of tooth, claw, talon, beak, spine, and poisonous 

 fang ages upon ages before a human being trod the earth. We 

 can hardly blame man for it all, for he proves an alibi, he 

 wasn't here. But more suggestive is our discovery that thorns 

 at least were not original creations at all. They were simply 

 twigs which for the time being had more important business to 

 attend to, and had given up the function of bearing leaf, flower, 

 fruit, and had developed sharpness. They did this purely as 

 defenders of the mother plant. Plant life originally, — for we 

 find the plants and so know what we are talking about, — in 

 those early times when the earth's atmosphere was hot and 

 humid, and the air was charged with carbonic acid gas, as it is 

 not today, plant life was of a rank, weedy, spongy sort. It 

 was soft, and as soon as animal life could be supported at all it 

 was devoured by those huge "Dragons of the Prime." Now 

 many of the juicier, softer, sweeter plants, of course, were 

 rendered entirely extinct, feeding those great creatures which 

 made the beginning of animal life upon the earth. Those few 

 that chanced to be hardest and least palatable survived to pass 



